Planning for success

A Polish architect and a German professor of computer science are using artificial intelligence to speed up Britain’s failing planning system. Ewa Moskwiak explains how it all works.

EWA MOSKWIAK is clearly excited. “It’s a little scary.” she says. “So many people believe it can work - we just have to get it right.”

The ‘it’ in this case is PlanningHub, an online platform that promises to streamline the difficult and time-consuming business of processing planning applications in the UK.

It’s an idea that emerged from a venture capital boot camp, and it’s one that has taken off with VC funding that values the emerging business at more than £4 million and has won the start-up a UK Innovation Agency Smart Grant as well as a Bridge AI grant.

Ewa was already a successful entrepreneur when she applied for a place on Antler venture capital’s accelerator programme.

An architect trained in Poznan, Poland and Milan in Italy, she had practised in Northern Ireland and in London before setting up her own architectural practice and venturing into development and investment. Her London business was doing pretty well, but it wasn’t really challenging enough. “I’m a doer, an achiever,” she says, “I cannot just sit and do nothing. It’s not in my nature.”

So, she (along with 1,500-2,000 others) applied for one of the 70 places on Antler’s accelerator - a programme designed to produce and test ideas the VC might invest in. In the face of stiff competition, she was accepted.

Her initial concept had been to identify underused and underdeveloped sites and buildings suitable for conversion to homes. “We are constantly talking about there being not enough homes,” she says. “I could see the wasted potential in the building stock.”

But one of the benefits of the accelerator programme, she says, is that it encourages bigger thinking.

“Antler helped me to reframe the idea of finding opportunities in the built environment and to look for the really big problem that needed solving.”

Ewa worked with others on the programme to interview 150 stakeholders across the whole property, planning, investment and development sector. Two crunch points in the development process emerged: the first was financial instability in a period of high interest rates; the second was planning risk.

The high interest rates would eventually sort themselves out, but planning risk wasn’t going to disappear anytime soon.

A survey by the Royal Town Planning Institute had already revealed that 90 per cent of local authorities have a backlog of planning applications, 80 per cent say they don’t have enough staff to deal with that backlog and 70 per cent have difficulties recruiting enforcement officers.

On top of that, the British planning system - rooted in a 1947 Act of Parliament - is tough even for experts to navigate. Data is scattered, updated randomly and often has to be sorted manually. Aggravated by staff shortages, it is also prone to mistakes and omissions leading to financial waste that PlanningHub estimates at around £1.2 billion a year.

Time after time, Ewa was told that the planning system was in crisis and was holding up development. If the backlog of planning applications could be cleared up and the process of collating relevant data for new applications improved, the impact would be huge.

Enter Professor Dr Harald Braun. Harald is a visiting Professor of Health Economics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Chester and holds a doctorate in computer science with a specialism in AI.

Working together, Ewa and Harald developed a new venture - PlanningHub - that would use AI and large language models to collate planning data from all over the UK. That data would power an online platform, which would be available to individual homeowners, architects, town planners, local planning authorities and property investors.

The idea was that all users would need to do is to enter the type of development - from a kitchen extension to a new residential housing development - into the portal along with a geographical location, and PlanningHub would rapidly produce a report covering all information specific to that query including: site details; relevant planning decisions and planning policy; environmental issues and a summary of other considerations.

Instant access to all of the relevant planning data would enable the applicant to more accurately predict the outcome of their application, reduce their legislative burden and limit their financial risk. The goal, Ewa says, is to reduce the search process from hours and even days, in some cases, to minutes. And the beneficiaries include homeowners, developers and investors, architects and the hard-pressed local planning authorities themselves.

The idea was trialled and honed during the ten week accelerator programme in London’s new tech-town, Aldgate East, with  Ewa presenting and re-presenting the concept to a panel of venture capitalists. At the end of the programme, Antler VC decided to back PlanningHub.

Six months later, other investors introduced by Antler - Fuel Ventures and an angel investor - pitched in with a further round of funding, and then Ewa and Harald heard that their application for a government Smart Grant successful.

The new business was given a further boost when it was invited to join Geovation, a government backed accelerator programme focusing on the prop-tech and geo-tech industries and run by the Land Registry and Ordnance Survey. PlanningHub has now joined the Geovation tech community in its London centre, which is where it is now based.

“We are the first people in the world to use AI to collate planning documents,” Ewa says, “There are a few challenges. We won’t be able to operate where there are no digital records, nobody else has done it, and as the technology is still maturing, we are experimenting a lot and testing the capabilities of the technology. It’s all R&D.”

The embryonic company now has three full-time software engineers, and a planner on the team as well as Ewa as CEO and Harald who is Chief Technical Officer. The first trial is already underway at Enfield Borough Council, and PlanningHub’s goal is to roll the whole programme out across the UK within 18 months.

For the moment, there are three levels of product development: improving the technology; scaling the business geographically; and scaling up the level of complexity it can handle from simple household projects to more complex developments.

“It’s fun,” says Ewa, “you know, it feels good … I think it’s going in the right direction.”